Why the British prime minister’s job is an impossible one
WHEN HE WAS prime minister of the world’s most powerful country in 1902-05, Arthur Balfour spent as much time as he could on his 180,000-acre Scottish estate. The days were for golf on his private course. The evenings were for dinner, after-dinner games and his other great addiction, serious conversation (despite his Bertie Wooster persona, Balfour was a distinguished philosopher). The one thing that didn’t get a look-in was politics, to which his “mind did not naturally turn”, as he confessed to his sister. He did not read newspapers on the ground that “nothing matters very much and most things don’t matter at all.”
Autres temps, autres moeurs. These days prime ministers spend every waking hour trying to master events, only to be broken by them in the end. In “The Prime Ministers”, Steve Richards, a journalist, uses the following phrases to describe his subjects’ lot: “toiling fragility”, “fearful paralysis” and “wretched powerlessness”. The careers of the last six prime ministers have all ended in tears, visibly so in the case of Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May. “I don’t know why anyone would want the job,” the queen apparently remarked to Boris Johnson when appointing him.
Why has Balfour’s easy chair become so uncomfortable? One possible explanation is that all top jobs are heading in the...